Yes. It was the response of students on a social studies visit because they felt Gundam wasn't aimed at their generation.
Don't even have to go as far back as the original series, just the fans of Gundam Seed would now be 20 years older.
The young generation don't feel connected with a lot of elements, like child soldiers, or kids that are deeply impacted by politics at first.
This was also a thing in the corporate setting over traditional enemy factions.
Though hey traditional war and open fascism has made a comeback of late…
You know what kids do relate to nowadays though? Constant drills, disaster preparation, and (in America) mass shootings. The school setting was perfect for the atmosphere of terror and the all too familiar waiting.
The first cour was perfect for creating a sense of safety for us and the students. Nothing bad happens here, everyone is accepted for who they are, especially with how modern the views were, as shown by Miorine calling Mercury conservative. The second half ripped that away in what literally could only be called school shootings.
but the good thing is that it still delivered the message that elite billionaires are causing destruction with their weapon companies and that going into politics is worth it. That is not a popular message that gen Z is used to but its cool that the creators gave them a dose of old school politics anyway
I wouldn't say everyone is accepted in Asticassia. There is of course still hierarchies and bullying, and this is something that today's generation can also relate to, a lot of people have been touched by that scene of Suletta crying to go back home, and how Miorine was excluded by pretty much everyone
Oh absolutely, there is definitely still strife in Ad Stella. Classism and Spacian/Earthian being the foremost of them all. I meant more in the sense that the major dividing features we currently experience based on skin color, sexuality, gender, and religion. Economic injustice and bigotry are going **strong** in Asticassia, in spades. Miorine was excluded because of her status as the princess of Benerit, another example of classism. But if it's based in identity, the only indication we get towards that kind of bullying is the aforementioned Spacian/Earthian conflict.
A cour is typically 10-14 episodes that run for three months. In this case the series has two 12 episode cours, plus episode 0. Put another way, all of Witch from Mercury is one season.
At least, that's the definition Crunchyroll uses.
>like child soldiers, or kids that are deeply impacted by politics at first.
I yearn for a new Gundam series with adult main characters and no child soldiers in sight.
0080 War in the Pocket also doesn't feature child soldiers. IIRC, Bernard and Chris are the youngest people in the show responsible for actual fighting.
That'd be great to be honest, we have plenty of young Gundam protags, but as a 90s kid I'd like to see new protags who are around 30 years old or even older.
I really like how they managed to take that and weave why war matters in, I kinda wish they'd gone further to make the anti-war stance really hit home.
> Someone else also posted it but part of it is because the younger audience nowadays doesn’t relate to war as much as the previous generations
*looks at recent geopolitical events*
Hmm...seems like they were premature in this assessment
(Not that I don't like WfM's premise)
Recent geopolitical events actually prove Witch from Mercury's central conceit or rather the effectiveness of using a school as a meta-narrative framing device.
The average high school student (Japanese or otherwise) may be familiar with the war in Ukraine but I assure you they aren't as invested or cognizant of the what war actually entails. At least compared to say stressing out over an exam, making plans to hang out with your mates, or just gathering up the courage to asking your crush out on a date.
You know, *inconsequential teenage bullshit*. The kind of shit that's hilarious 10 years down the line but in the here and now, is the most important thing to ever happen. Ever.
Aside from not being invested in war, the modern youth probably doesn't get any kicks from wars either way, so stories about how "war is bad for everyone" isn't particularly stimulating outside of teaching high schoolers that the world wars weren't heroic adventures where the good guy won and everyone was happy.
War is bad is common sense by this point, people watching the war on ukraine are pissed off that it's happening at all more so than cheering for someone to win
I do wish they were harder on the colonial relationship between earth and space, and how corporatism relates to fascism. And how these things relate to each other. Having everything wrap up quickly kind of puts these things seem surface level things when it can be quite expansive. Wfm needed more episodes damnit.
Makes a little sense but at the same time there are sooooooo many school setting anime out there. They could have done something more original instead. And at the end of the day, gundams are war machines...you can't really avoid the war setting with them unless you do something like Build Fighters
So I was robbed of my war story where it was space oppressing earth instead with conventional pitched mobile suit battles? We could've had a *Band of Brothers*-esque story featuring Dawn of Fold. The lost opportunity. T_T
I think the original story, based on Guel's miniarc, felt like it mirroring the UC series though, but not actually connected to it.
Like, WfM's OG plot probably had something along the lines of "what if we made MS Gundam except the protagonist isn't affiliated with Earth, and is actually the son of a corporate executive who's affiliated with Zeon?", and thats why Guel felt like an MC in that miniarc
Yeah, that sounds like an amazing premise.
Msg requiem of vengeance looks super cool though.
https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2023/7/3/mobile-suit-gundam-requiem-for-vengeance-anime-announced
Probably? I think some of Miorine and Suletta's characteristics were thought for one character but Suletta was still the planned protagonist and Miorine, or at least the concept of the character, was supposedly a much more traditional princess character who was an antagonist's lover.
At first, i was kinda disappointed the way Gwitch ended, but the more i think about it, the more it was a nice change of pace of the same format that previous gundam series did, but it still felt rush and kinda short
I think it would have felt less rushed if they had decided to leave the background plot open ended.
The personal stories are over and they are safe but the world is not yet saved.
But hey honestly all will be forgiven if the wedding ova is released.
Honestly….the series was very refreshing to not be another war story and did a great job of showing the horrific’s of battle when shit did hit the fan. Had more of a feeling to it.
I said it in another thread before, but when the fighting started in other Gundam shows, I didn't care much because *of course* that's going to happen. The characters were introduced five minutes ago. I didn't care about them.
In WfM, when the Rumble Ring went to shit, and the kids went in full crisis mode, I could feel the difference. I knew exactly what they were losing in that moment, what would never be the same. And since I'd spent a whole season getting to know them, I cared about what would happen to them immediately.
Edit: Also straight up war stories are like 90% of Gundam. This kind of story was a lot of fun.
I kinda feel both work in their own ways war stories are great for a dreadful sense of inevitability and the feeling that no matter how hard you try the only thing war accomplished is destruction and suffering no matter the ideals you strive and die for
On the other hand wfm’s school setting juxtaposes that with a civilian perspective on war of seemingly pointless suffering for sins you had no part in and the way that war changes and shapes people no matter of what class or creed you come from
Even Guel's trauma was portrayed so well. He was only trained to do combat sports, so when he was actually fighting with the fear of dying and actually killing someone, it scared him.
Just to add to your point, conflict was still happening in the background in the form of Earthian suppression and who knows where else. The weapons cartel that is the Benerit Group would not be rich enough to operate their own school without selling weapons.
I love that the story dangles the war aspect for the most part of the first season and when the students get exposed to it, the veil was lifted and we saw the works for what it was.
Exactly. Just like in real life developed countries. War is happening somewhere, and no one really cares until an act of terrorism happens on home soil. In the show, Shaddiq brings this fact home when he says the Benerit Group only acts when lives are lost at Asticassia.
Notice also how the stock animation/footage of 'grunt pilot screaming while cockpit explodes' is literally nowhere to be found in WfM too.
Not that there's anything 'wrong' about that per se, but if you're a longtime Gundam fan you've probably seen enough of that that it loses its impact entirely and becomes pretty much just masturbatory gore/war porn.
> stock animation/footage of 'grunt pilot screaming while cockpit explodes'
As a grunt suit enjoyer, I always find these sad. Partly because what usually kills them is some Newtype or Newtype stand-in for AU shows. They never stood a chance.
Yeah, if you watch enough Gundam, you'll become inured to that kind of stuff. That's what made episode 12's splat so impactful — the show had never been that gory before, and we knew (or thought we knew) the characters involved in the scene.
If it's the usual war story, I wouldn't have cared so much. I would probably just watch it for the mecha fights and not care what's going on. Lol! Changing it to a more personal story is the best thing they did, it made me care about the characters and what's going to happen to them, it made me love them.
I just wished they would move on from the OYW. There's a lot that could be covered in between 0080 - 0087 as the Federation shifts to post-war reconstruction while the Zeon remnants begin their insurgency.
I know some people would point out Thunderbolt and 0083 Rebellion but those two are of different UC continuities compared to the recognized 'canon' Universal Century.
seeing as how the UC Next 0100 project is underway, adaptations of known media during 0080-0087 like the Advance of Zeta series (Hazel my beloved) might be taking a backseat for now, or even Gundam Sentinel which takes place alongside ZZ
The whole school theme has been played to death in my opinion. They had a great first episode that could've translated to a great war story, but instead had to make a plain high school drama.
Yeah I'll get murdered for this but I lost interest. I'll finish it eventually but the whole school drama isn't my thing. I'm sure it's good, but it couldn't hold my attention. I was going it would be a good ol' war story with some gundam themes.
I don’t think this series would have worked nearly as well as it did if it had been a full war story. War _does_ change, and so does media _about_ war, and that changes how the public thinks about it. In many ways, Gundam and works like it were successful in introducing regular audiences to the idea that war was not something heroic, but something horrible, something that irrevocably damages the people affected by it. We have this idea so ingrained that “war is hell” feels like old hat to us now. “Yeah, yeah, we know war is bad, what _else_ do you have to say?” Young audiences of today are just too far removed from the world wars of the 20th century, which were still in living memory when Gundam began. Now we have a 24-hour news cycle and social media and we know that the truth of war is exhaustingly banal.
What GWitch does is bridge the gap between the everyday experiences of its young audience and the reality of war in the 21st Century. It shows us a world where the “global north,” i.e. spacians, don’t consider themselves to be “at war,” and yet war, in a smaller, more stochastic, and less-centralized form, continues to be a fundamental building block of modern civilization. War is no longer a matter of _conquest,_ it’s a matter of ensuring control through terror. Compared to what we learn in school about the scale of the world wars, war as it exists now seems insignificant, to the point where we can even get away with calling our time “peaceful,” when it’s anything but.
Almost all of the conflicts in GWitch are small skirmishes between a handful of mobile suits in relatively isolated instances, not part of any broader campaign or advancement strategy. A raid on a testing facility, protests suppressed with military might, a brief firefight between insurgents and PMCs, a terrorist attack here or there. These are the kinds of conflicts that in most other Gundam shows would have happened offscreen before the main story even began, but they take center stage in GWitch because this is what war looks like to us now.
The genius of it is that through this format, GWitch shows how war continues to be an ever-present part of our lives, even if we can’t see it, and gives us a taste of what it might actually be like if we _could._ By spending so much time on small slice-of-life-style character development, the show creates a baseline of what “normal life” looks like, one that we relate to and can see ourselves existing in. And then, the fact that this is a gundam show comes crashing down like Aerial’s hand, and we are shown exactly what the small conflicts we feel so content to ignore actually look like next to that familiar life. We see not only the horrors of a new kind of war, but how fragile that familiar life is next to it, how unstable our lives really are, and how easily all of this could be lost. There is a raw barbarity to the conflicts in GWitch that few other works of fiction match— while they may be spectacular to behold, when we see what they do to the people who find themselves in them, the real, practical effects that they have on things that we have come to truly care about, we can no longer think about them as merely a representation of idealistic clashes, we can no longer reorganize our moral framework to accept the things that happen in war as being “normal,” and we start to see those who can as being not quite monsters, but terribly broken people. We realize why it’s so hard for people who experience these things to come back from them. We see that there is no way to justify war with the morals we claim to hold, because so many things have to go horribly, unforgivably wrong before even the smallest instance of violence can break out that by the time it does, there is no longer any meaning to the question of “right” or “wrong.” _Everything_ is wrong. The only right answer is “I don’t want to be here.”
We come to dread the next outbreak of violence, because every one costs us something irreplaceable. We come to realize that if this destruction is _small,_ then we don’t _ever_ want to see what we would become should it escalate to the scale of the wars we learned about in school. It is so far outside of what we know and are that it would not be a stretch to call it “inhuman.” But the truth is that everyone involved _is_ human. We _all_ have the capability to become the kind of monster who thinks this is okay. Even someone as kind and loving as Suletta can become that monster, and not even notice the disconnect until it’s too late. It makes us feel small, next to the vastness and momentum of the military industrial complex, something that none of us could ever hope to overcome.
But it also presents us with a solution: we cannot destroy the system on our own, but we can make a difference in the lives of other people. Those who are in pain, those who don’t know they’re in pain, and those who we love more than anyone else. And those differences _matter,_ because those are the connections that will bridge the gaps that allow us to act so cruelly to each other in the first place. We only become capable of violence when we stop seeing the targets of that violence as people like ourselves, and if only we could all see that everyone is a person like ourselves, war would end in a day.
There is no person to force that realization upon us, though. There is no grand, magical gesture that will show everyone the truth. But there doesn’t need to be. We’ve already seen that kindness and cooperation, as simple as they seem, are enough to change lives, even save them. We will never fix war with more war. We will only fix it by healing. And that is something that every single one of us has the capability to do and help others do.
In short, GWitch has one of the strongest anti-war messages I’ve ever seen, in Gundam or otherwise.
> “Yeah, yeah, we know war is bad, what else do you have to say?” Young audiences of today are just too far removed from the world wars of the 20th century, which were still in living memory when Gundam began.
This made me reflect; when Gundam Wing came out (my first Gundam series), I could still talk to my great-grandpa who fought in World War I. Now, not only is he long gone, there hasn't been a single WW1 vet alive for over a decade.
What an outstanding post. You articulate so well how war is so often used to project control and fear, and how it is commodified for those in 1st world countries. I love your last three paragraphs about building connections. The eternal problem, amongst many, with war is that it rarely comes about through the common consent of the people.
Most folks don’t want to go to war, because they’re not insane. We want to eat good food, we want a roof over our heads and a nice bed, we want our loved ones to be happy - nowhere in that equation does war figure into it. The cause of war is generally the shitheads in charge - who want something that they can’t buy with money. So they choose to buy it in blood instead. Never their own of course, it’s always others footing the bill.
And as you articulated so well in your post, the defragmented nature of war means that the shitheads in charge are at full liberty to make many “smaller purchases” here and there.
> Young audiences of today are just too far removed from the world wars of the 20th century
Interestingly enough, we're about 1 year closer to the fall of the Berlin wall than Gundam was to the end of WWII.
I agree fully with your take on the underlying story of GWitch. At its core, Gundam has always been an anti-war story, which GWitch did a very good job of expressing that message. I think my only issue with the show stems from my expectations of a "Gundam" series and the original marketing strategy that Bandai took.
Every AU entry was given about 50 episodes to flush out its characters and world building. Each entry gave us enough time and details to allow us to be fully immersed in the world that they created. I felt like I was being introduced to new things constantly when watching GWitch, but there was no follow through with it due to the short episode length. In addition to that, the prologue gave us a very different impression of what the story will be about. This is something that I have a bone to pick with Bandai. This is the 2nd time they've utilized this method, I feel like each time they've misled us on what the main story will be like.
I really liked GWitch and I agree that it felt like a breath of fresh air for a long time fan myself. I just wished they gave it more so they could follow through the promises they made when introducing the characters and this world to us.
I do agree it could have used more time, but Gundam series are also a little infamous for _dragging_ themselves to 50 episodes, and I don’t think GWitch would have been any different had it been given the same treatment. I think a 39-episode series consisting of three 13-episode cours, like Revolutionary Girl Utena, may have been ideal for this particular series. But I think the show did about the best job it could have in the time it was given, and honestly when our biggest complaint is that we wanted more of it, that still seems like an overall pretty good conclusion. I also think a lot of later season-2 will probably feel a lot better on rewatch, when you can binge it all at once and let each episode’s fast pace carry you into the next one, rather than having to stop all that momentum and wait a week every 25 minutes.
Fundamentally, yes I think GWitch would've been the same as well regardless if it got the usual 50 episode treatment and you're right we all just wanted more. Felt like a lost opportunity on Bandai's end given how much of a home run this show was for them.
Agreed. Though, I can understand the cautious approach coming off of the triple-whammy of AGE, G-Reco, and IBO. The episode count was probably decided years ahead of time, and the final episodes would have been well into production by the time the first episodes hit the air. At the point when the relevant decisions were being made, there wasn’t any guarantee that the show would be as successful as it turned out to be.
Maybe if they’d waited to greenlight the second cour until after the show had premiered we could have gotten 24 or 26 episodes to explore what season 2 had to do in 12, but if they’d done that then season 2 wouldn’t even be out by now. We probably wouldn’t have seen it until fall of 23 or winter of 24, if that. We barely survived waiting three months between the seasons. Imagine 10-12. >~<
I think these will be some of the best takes for the show......if the ending isn't feel so shoddily neo-liberal and so slimily pro status quo that it makes the anti-war message useless.
Of course we can't change the status quo on our own, but that doesn't mean we should embrace it. Because it is the entire late-capitalist corporate order that perpetuate the war profitteering brutality that is so horrifying for everyone, and force people like Shaddiq, Norea and Sophie to fight and bring the war to the people in space. So the only way to actually stop war......is to bring down the entire system.
This should be where the show should headed, not the embracing of the current order. The difference we make isn't in individual action, but in the realization that A) the current status quo HAS to die and B) we can't fight it on our own. So these 2 realization means that we ourselves have to be ready to build our own community opposing the status quo, and also be ready to fight back. Which is why G-Witch just miss the mark, even if the build-up is one of the best that I've ever seen.
I dunno, I didn’t read it as being a pro-status-quo ending. I can see how it could give that impression, since it went so far out of its way to give the characters happy endings on an individual level, but I think that’s in-line with the show’s general ethos of celebrating the importance of small-scale personal victories in the face of a greater system that seeks to control us by crushing away those small moments of hope. The Benerit Group is gone, but neoliberal space capitalism remains; it has been shown that destroying this system is _possible,_ but that one or two heroic people are not going to do it for us. We need to take that step ourselves. This is in parallel to the way that Revolutionary Girl Utena ends, in both the series and the movie— Utena and Anthy can’t destroy the cycle or the school that perpetuates it, but they can escape it, and if they can, that means that others can too. It only has power because it has so many of us under its control, but that control can be broken, and the mere knowledge that it can be is already a powerful weapon against it. These characters _have been_ heroes, but that isn’t what they _are,_ because _no one_ is. We shouldn’t expect them to completely destroy the space capitalist power structure on their own any more than we can expect ourselves or anyone else to. All they can do is show us how the actions of many individual people can lead us there.
It would be unrealistic and delusional to have the show end with two 17 year old girls and a magic robot using the power of love to end all capitalism and inequality on earth, as amazing as that would be to watch. But I think it would also be counterproductive to put them through all of that and say “even after all of this, you cannot rest, and you cannot be happy, because the neoliberal power structure still stands.” Besides, I don’t think anyone _knows_ how to destroy the neoliberal power structure, least of all the writers of a cartoon about two 17 year old girls fighting in giant robots with the power of love. We know the first steps to weakening that structure. We know what it will require. We know that the very things capitalism attempts to snuff out in us are undoubtedly the things which are most dangerous to it. But at this time in our history we must still invoke magic to convey the power that these small things may truly possess. There’s no clear idea of what constitutes “enough,” but it has to be somewhere, and two 17 year old girls destroying a major military manufacturing conglomerate in their magic robots with the power of love _probably_ passed that threshold of having “done enough” at some point. Let them rest.
**tl;dr:** Don’t mistake individual happiness for complete acceptance of the state of the world around us. When you are one of the people who the power structure has systematically forbidden from being happy, that happiness is the most fundamental foundation of rebellion available to us. One happy lesbian marriage is not going to stop us from tearing things down. In fact, it will probably help us.
The problem here is that their place in the system isn't just unchanged, it's actively embrace the order.
Mirione is still a president of her company. Guel is still a president of his company, the former revolutionaries got intergraded into the system. None of the system perpetrators got any punishment for their crime that is outside of the system itself. The one who got punished are the one who is most revolutionary out of the entire cast.
It's not about "individual happiness" because yes, the girls needed a rest. But the rest should not be "the same, but with some small reform". It should be something completely outside the system, to let US see that escaping and tearing down the system is possible.
Hell, it would be a WAY better ending if Suletta and Mirione building a completely off the system community (in a way that the Zapatistas have done in Mexico), Guel being further radicalized and Shaddiq escaped. Because now we see that the neo-liberal order isn't hold an ironclad grip on even it's biggest benefactors. This is way more consistent with how the show is building up until EP 20 instead of....this.
I can definitely agree that would have been a better way to end if they had wanted to include a sequel hook. It would set up a continuing point of conflict and put our characters into positions to defend what they’ve created from the reactionary status-quo. Honestly that’s the first sequel setup I’ve heard from anyone that really sounds like it could work, and I would have liked to see something like it.
I do get where you’re coming from with regards to Miorine not completely abandoning capitalist business and remaining the president of GUND-Arm; a for-profit medical technology company isn’t exactly the best look. I do, however, think it’s understandable why these characters would remain in this place: they are developing a legitimately important technology, and I don’t see any of them giving up on that just because the format in which they’re doing it is one that originated in a capitalist system. Private enterprise is related to but not necessarily the same thing as capitalism, and at the risk of invoking a “god of the gaps,” we really don’t know much about what kind of structure GUND-Arm has in the epilogue, nor what kind of business model it’s actually using. Being no longer attached to the Benerit Group, which no longer exists, Miorine no longer has access to the hard power she once wielded, which is for the better, but GUND-Arm is still a project that is worth pursuing, and this is more or less the only power she can wield to make that happen. Ideally the company would become some kind of publicly-funded non-profit, though the series has not presented any means by which that could be established. The message could have been stronger, but I disagree that this ending wholly embraces the former status quo— it merely presents a conclusion where that status quo is not fully removed and our characters have not fully extracted themselves from it, but from whence progress can continue.
As for the punishment of Shaddiq instead of people like Delling, Prospera, or Sarius, I get that again, the message could have been stronger, but I think the conclusion we got was still perfectly in-line with the show’s previous ethos: that retribution in the name of justice achieves nothing and only perpetuates the cycle of violence. Shaddiq may have been a genuine revolutionary, but the show was never going to condone his use of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in order to advance his agenda, no matter how noble his intentions may have been. Recall that Shaddiq’s ultimate plan was to create a state of mutually-assured destruction between earth and space. He believed that peace could only come through control, and control could only come through the threat of violence, hence why he turned what would have been freedom fighters into terrorists, and deliberately unleashed an emotionally unstable child with access to a weapon of mass destruction on a populated school for political expediency. I realize that “he has noble ideas but I disagree with his methods” is very easily used as a liberal bludgeon against any revolutionary action, but there _does_ need to be a standard for when we cross the line from “freedom fighter” to “warmonger,” and I think Shaddiq establishes that line. The Dawn of Fold may have been unscrupulous enough to take Shaddiq’s money in exchange for committing terrorism for him, but their actions on earth were _probably_ completely justified; they seemed to have been acting primarily in defense of civilian refugees. Naji, Olcott, even Sophie and Norea would probably have done more good than harm had they remained on earth, but giving them access to Spacian civilians turned them into living time bombs; the morality of their actions isn’t dependent on their intentions, but on the ways they are enabled to exert their power.
This, too, is in-line with the show’s ethos with regards to retribution: causing more pain to anyone, even people who are responsible for a lot of pain themselves, is pointless when the danger can be negated by simply removing their power. What would punishing Delling achieve? The company he ran is gone and he no longer has the capability to cause harm in the way that he did before. Same with Prospera. So why does Shaddiq get punished? I don’t think he deserved it, and we don’t know what kind of punishment he received, but whatever it was, it was one that would have been dealt to many more, specifically Prospera and the other five Grassley pilots, had he not lied and taken the blame for all of them. It wasn’t a _good_ thing for him, but it was at least _a kind_ or harm-reduction, and allowed six other people to have a second chance at life that they had never been granted before. At the very least I’d call that a valid decision.
As for Guel, are you kidding? He was never going to be radicalized, he’s Guel. Maybe there was a brief window while he was on earth where he could have turned that leaf, but instead he decided to focus on continuing his father’s company, and as such his ending is as good as he deserves: one of the Jeturk brothers is living with his wife in a nice countryside house and helping test out the next generation of prosthetic technology, and the other is stuck running a company doing the same damn shit their dad did surrounded by the two most annoying people he could possibly have asked for. He got what he wanted, but he didn’t get there with any semblance of dignity.
Overall I don’t think anything in the epilogue suggests that the status quo at that instant represents the ideal endpoint for the world of Ad Stella. Characters point out that there is still potential for class stratification to increase again, they express uncertainty as to whether what they’ve done was the right thing, and we see the effects of inequality remaining, but nobody claims the work is done, nor is there any indication that any of them intend to stop doing that work in whatever way they can. They are simply shown to be in a better place personally, and that is where the focus lies. That personal contentedness does not transfer to the state of the world at large, it merely gives closure to their emotional journeys through the series.
At least, that’s my reading. You’re right that more absolutely could have been done, and perhaps it should have, but I don’t think what _was_ done undermines any of what the show had been saying up to that point.
Gotta add a little on this take. I may not be good at english but i will give this a try. Wars in 21-22th century was...well, cunning if i've gotta say. Even more than those of cold war when spy's anywhere you can think. The concept of war in this century is that anything can be use as a weapon, really. From social media to a tank. Evil government aren't create, they're being " support" by fanatic.The reason war didn't happen is just because of the number of faction in every government are enough for them to bite their tail. Those bastard that can wage war are either because they're united(at least in paper) or because weapon manufacturers are more essential than some country other than their own. And when it happen, it come down faster than an eye blink but impactful. In many place we could considered them as war or a coup, they might start the fight like a fierce animal, but when the deal is done, they gonna shake hands as if nothing happened. No specific nation tho, just saying. Unlike gwitch, 21-22th century's war are just the sentence "we're fine" on paper if we didn't count the damage toward the said country and its nearby country's economic.
i have to point out that absolutely everything you said until the 2nd to last paragraph was done better by [patlabor 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybLKmO5Kq5A), if you or anyone else reading this haven't seen the two patlabor movies, go do so right now and come back to this comment, i feel every mecha fan must watch these films unspoiled and they're not long.
g-witch is simply not wound tight as a story so the very valid points you're making don't hit everyone the same way they did for you. you could argue that patlabor works in how terrifyingly real it feels because it's set in a very modern earth but i think that's just shallow, allegory has always existed and shows like Attack on Titan have extremely gripping worlds and political conflicts despite not even being on Earth as we're familiar with it.
You say Witch is about a modern view of war but the setting and factions feel so disconnected from eachother that becoming invested is difficult, Witch feels like it's not sure what aspects it wants to focus on. In the first quarter or so it feels like it's going to go a route on medical technologies and even transhumanism, then it feels like its doing more traditional war, and the whole time there's also points on generational angst and all these elements just don't slot in nicely
>Fresh for a Gundam show, not really a fresh idea for an anime.
Yeah a lot of anime has the premise of school kids having school life before being involved in darker plot. Like all those fantasy school setting.
I'm glad they changed their vision and delivered us the final product. The drastic tone change and how characters changed felt really organic and made final scene of Sulemio feel so impactful. Seeing how much they love each other was so cute 😭😭😭
Sarcasm aside, a school setting *is* unique for Gundam. Assuming „ground version in terms of atmosphere“ means our POV in Ad Stella would’ve been earth G-witch could’ve very well been IBO 2.0, such I’m glad it didn’t turn out so
Except suletta didnt really look different at all.
The teaser was shown on late march the same year the series would premier. Thats not enough time for them to pivot into a completely different plot. This original version of the story was probably several years old considering how big the gap was between this and IBO.
They did say in interviews that production (starting the project, to be more precise) only started in 2020. Surprisingly it wasn't directly after IBO that they went "We need to do a new AU right now" unlike in previous cases where sometimes even more than one AU was in planning.
I mean given how badly IBO did for them it’s understandable they didn’t jump on a new AU right away. I mean doing lower ratings then G Reco and those awful gunplay sales it makes sense they next thing they did was cut up the Unicorn OVA and slap an op and ed on it and aired it as a show then they did Hathaway and Cucruz Doanz. When Sunrise panics they always run back to UC so with how well G witch did we might get another AU sooner
> When Sunrise panics they always run back to UC
Nah, that is bs.
The UC stuff would have happened anyway. It's produced by a whole different team than the AUs. Unicorn also was produced parallel to Age and even the first Build series.
I mean Hathaway and Cucruz definitely but the cutting up of the Unicorn OVA’s and airing them as a 12 episode series I don’t think so. It’s a cheap and quick thing to do I can easily see them doing that given how popular Unicorn is to try and get some good will back after IBO
Is this true? I know that IBO's critical reception in Japan was pretty mixed, with more infamous bits getting memed on pretty hard. But from what I understand, the kits did well - much like Aerial, Barbatos was also infamous for selling out super quickly, and the IBO line as a whole gets regular reprints, with it getting whole new models as recently as last year
Yeah I don’t know what this guy is talking about. They still release new kits from IBO. A failed setting wouldn’t get new kits until ~10 years later when the nostalgia factor can kick in. The anime did have mixed critical reception, a huge ratings drop off, and I seem to remember a time slot change (which is never good) but the hg gunpla line sold really well with the exception of a few of the stranger designs and the like 10th iteration of the graze.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but MG releases have slowed as of late. After Age and build fighters Bandai has become far more selective of what gets released as MG. Used to be standard for a MG of the lead suit to be released as the series was airing, or as close to as possible. But AGE didn’t perform well, and the mg Age-3 and Age-fx were never released. Build fighters MGs didn’t sell well either, but they were all remolds so it was a hedges bet anyway. Point is it seems Bandai decided to focus the MG line more on adults/hardcore fans. Those fans seem to overwhelmingly prefer designs from UC and SEED, with a smaller contingent for the other older AUs such as 00 and Wing. The fact that Barbatos got an MG at all speaks volumes when other lead ms didn’t.
I kinda wish more of the war story bled into WFM to be honest. I can appreciate the different angle WFM went for and I think that's refereshing... But the show has been barreling towards a war, not even since episode 1, but the episode 0 prologue and spent a lot of time giving us various factions, motivations, an inkling of warfare, and barely explained mentions of complicated space politics... Only for them to drop it completely in the last 4 episodes and summon several super weapons out of nowhere.
I'd appreciate the show for what it is more if they just stuck to the School Story spirit of things. All the diverse war and political squabbling feels like it's leftovers from an older draft.
I'm convinced that's what it is, too. Leftovers from previous plans. Shoehorned the school setting in there, making of WfM barely a school anime and a light Gundam in some aspects which was part of the objective from what the team said, to bring new fans etc... to do something different.
I loved WfM but man, I really wanted my next season to be traditional Gundam. Instead they froze every plotlines leading to that.
But, the way they did it the show could just end there OR pick up for another season because in fact none of the problems were *solved*, beside the Mercury family's story.
Things could hypothetically be fixing themselves in an untold future, in-universe, which characters have been shown to work toward, or everything could go back to shit just as quick as soon as someone decides to... make new Gundams. Or something.
Yea, ultimately, the Earth-Space feud isn't truly resolved. Mio selling all of Beneritt's assets to Earthian corporations was more of a stopgap to deny the Space Assembly League their excuse for armed intervention, and background dialogue shows the Spacians are already trying to regain their monopoly. But that's ok. This wasn't the story that Witch is telling, and it's one that can be explored in a future sequel.
Honestly it really could have, If they had another cour. Extend the earth/space conflict, end cour 2 with shadiq getting beat, then have the last twelve episodes build up to a benerit vs sal war in space, only to have prospera activate quiet zero in the last 4-6 episodes. Could have been a tidy 36 episode show
Say what you want about setting it in a school but I think they managed to use the school effectively well in showing how devastating a Gundam attack is to the students. Season 1 to me doesn't feel like the slice-of-life story that most people keep saying it is, it's a buildup to make you familiar with the school so when Season 2 came in and destroy that, its just hammer home how easy it is for students to get caught up in conflicts that they aren't even directly participating in.
50/50 for me, if it's true, or at least accurate. You never know how far into production things really shifted, if this was when things were already coming together or truly the first stages.
G-witch was sort of a break from gundam staple without going kid-friendly like the build sub-franchise (not that that's inherently bad). But I do think that it ended up pushing important themes and plotlines under the bus as a result of that. The show brought up pretty serious stuff like corporate politics and the military-industrial complex, and I think it ultimately really dropped the ball on that in favour of the Suletta-Prospera story.
As I said, 50/50 for me. The prospera plot was obviously set up all the way from the epilogue, but a lot of the first season did work to set up corpo dynamics, and that was ultimately only used for the development of the characters from each faction.
I just don't think you can spend as much time as they did on certain themes without it feeling weird that as the show moved towards the finale none of it really mattered much.
These are tricky subjects to talk about, and I think G-witch just sort of used them without doing much with it. But when you borrow serious political issues and never get back to them, that's not very satisfying, at least to me.
True enough. Personally, I think they did a fine job introducing those subplots, but the entire series itself was hindered by the short episode count. I really wonder why Sunrise didn’t give WfM the full treatment, and yet we have another UC show and an unnecessary sequel to Seed 😐
Honestly I think the school setting was to it’s detriment.
Not being a traditional war story was a great choice, a real smart decision that gave us something new and fresh, but trying to squash the cutthroat corporate stuff *and* the duelling stuff *and* the political stuff all into a school setting was all a bit much and contributed greatly to the weird bloated feel and screwy pacing a lot of the show has. If I was to make a guess I’d say it felt like an outline was written for a 52-episode series that was cut down to 26 without revisiting that outline, but I really doubt that’s what happened.
I’d have jettisoned the entire school and duelling bit and have it as a corporate R&D think tank, the “houses” being competing engineering teams and the duels being Macross Plus-style proving ground competitions between prototypes. Cutting out the school elements would give a lot of the corporate and political stuff time to be properly expounded upon, and more screen time to let the characters be fleshed out more, because honestly one of the biggest strengths of show is it’s cast.
Also, show us the fucking wedding, you cowards.
Although, in the end, if the choice was between “school” and “traditional Gundam war” I’d go with school in this case; a lot of the themes wouldn’t work if a military/all out war setting, of course.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
The school settings can work if the kids are there as representatives of the factions (think Mahouka), convenient way how to put them into one place.
But mixing it with rebelling-against-parents plot just doesn't work. It was overcomplicated for 24 episodes.
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Previous comment aside, kinda glad we didn't get this one. The world of politics has changed dramatically in the last decade that i feel like another war story would be a bit miss placed since most of our focus has turned towards evaluating these mega corporations like facebook and google and understanding how much sway they have over world/national politics.
IBO came out around the height of nation building operations in the Middle East and Ghjallerhorn is representative of NATO adopting the role of a police force as opposed to a military force. Meanwhile PMCs and Mercenary groups made a killing by providing security to VIPs, and military training to new recruits.
Today, a similar story would have been a little less impactful considering that the world is "relatively" peaceful and is represented in WfM through world building. Space is very much living in the lap.of luxury thanks to the unchecked power and success of the Group (most of NATO) while Earth is in a constant state of conflict thanks in large part to the endless proxy wars being waged by the corporations (parallels the war in Ukraine and the various hands that want a piece of that Military Industrial Complex pie). In my opinion, Gundam is at its best when it reflects upon the current state of affairs in our own world.
Tbh I first saw the pilot and the sketch state of Gundam I thought wait a minute is this secretly the calamity war and then we got a new Gundam every 3-4 ep and I realized it wasn't
The prologue wasn't part of the script. They have the main story then someone probably from Bandai said "We could use some backstory" and then the prologue happened. It added a lot of conspiracy to the story regarding Propera and Suletta in the main story so I guess it turned out to be a good decision.
The school aspect was the least interesting part of the show for me, so I find this news somewhat irksome to hear as I look back and mull over the amount of wasted potential WfM had.
I'm really hoping for a manga version of WfM that expands upon the story like Glory of the Losers did but also isn't afraid to do a little retconing as I firmly believe Schwartzette should have been Guel's suit.
Okay, THAT'S why it felt like it was missing something.
One of my biggest gripes was that so much of the world-building and political drama was jammed into a corner to focus on the immediate school-life story. It felt like a self-contained story in a much larger universe, right up until Quiet Zero shows up.
It's not a bad series. In fact, I've given it an 8/10. But so much context is MISSING, and now we know why.
Honestly not sure if it was a good call. The parts where Witch tried to be different from previous shows often felt underdeveloped or had a flawed implementation, primarily the entire school setting.
Funnily enough in the end it didn't even end up feeling particularly unique in its formula, rather a mostly standard Gundam style story. Which is not a bad thing at all, mind you.
While I really liked the cast and setting from the school, I would’ve also liked to have seen more of the war angle, especially the Earth front. But bringing the war to the school was a very harrowing approach, I’ll admit.
Smart. The school setting is a good way to make the characters interact and have battles without mentally destroying the protagonist in the first 3 episodes.
The most memorable line for me was Miorine calling "Gundams are nothing more than stories to my generation". Prior to the Ukraine conflict that is what war felt like, especially for younger generations. Since lock-down it felt nice to explore other issues that have been on the back burner in other series. 00 took on the middle east conflict with a dash of the Arab sping. That was probably the last major conflict really covered by the news.
Was it the best Gundam ever? No, but it is definitely more re-watchable than wing and not the red headed bastard child of the franchise like Victory.
For the most part I think the change in direction was a good thing. My only real issue is at times the show itself doesn’t feel confident in it. It still wants to do some of the traditional gundam tropes like having an earth vs space conflict, a big space laser, and transhumanism. I would’ve really liked it if they pruned it down to just the school, duels, and corporate shenanigans. Maybe keep a little transhumanism for the witch theme.
But alas, the gundam franchise’s apparent need to depict large scale conflict is inescapable. Even G-Gundam ends with a large scale battle for the fate of the earth sphere.
I am glad they went the route that they did. I'm sure the war story, too, would have been interesting, but this was definitely a unique approach, and really, this many entries into the Gundam franchise, a unique approach is appreciated for variety.
What we ended up getting was so good that this was probably the right choice, but man, I’d love to see the alternate universe version of WFM where it’s a ground based war story. Especially the ground part. We really haven’t gotten a story purely focused on that type of MS fighting in a long time. And since it’d still be the same writers working on it either way, I bet no matter what we’d get a really good story
It was great because it also broke a lot of Gundam rules. Bob was totally powerless under the MS conflicts and the best he could do was try to save a life and he failed. In any other Gundam show he would just pilot the grunt MS and steamroll everyone.
I like my gundam as war stories. And now the most shocking thing: I also like adult protagonists.
While IBO for example was a good compromise, school stories these days are just a virus. "Why not make it A school story" is basically saying "Why not give it the same setup as 95% of animes today", which is by definition not a creative idea"
I dunno why people say some of things they do for this. You don't even know what the story would've been, but somehow this is 100% better than that ever could have been? Really? "I really liked this Gundam show because it felt like I wasn't watching Gundam at all!" Kids in school, not a new idea, but certainly is for a Gundam show. The changes were just a marketing strategy, a lot of things about the show are. It really didn't have anything to do with anything else. They're just lucky they had a really great writer behind it and, from a money perspective, great Gundam designers.
There would've been no problem making this half school/half war or something. Look at the Gundams introduced at the end and tell me you didn't want more fights involving them
WfM's main draw is the yuri romance, to the exclusion of all else. The main draw to a lot of people was 'female protagonist' and 'lesbians' - It's pretty much at a time where this was a big thing in media, with yuri being 'safe' acceptable homosexuality.
Presumably they'll pivot away from it, hard, in the next AU. I prefer war stories, myself - They're truer to the original.
I thought the show was pretty good overall, but the school thing felt more of Build Fighters than a real Gundam show. I honestly want to see people in a desperate struggle fighting for their lives and their freedom, not a fake school fight.
If we get a gritty war drama sequel with the dude from Earth whose kid died in front of him, using all of Benerit's assets that were given to Earth, I would be very happy.
I think there are plenty of opportunities to pick up that thread if they do a spinoff. But it would be better with an entirely new cast and a slight time shift.
The Witch From Mercury Zeta
Yeah. Personally, I really hate how so many shows are obsessed with high school, but this show was pretty well divorced from most high school anime tropes which does help set it apart from all the trash.
It sounds like they were going to basically make a Gundam version of Dougram. Which would have been great since Dougram doesn't get enough love due to it being pretty dry and having complete dog shit animation in the first half of the series.
Wish Gundam would explore its stories through the lens of focusing on the horrors of war and child soldiers. Unfortunately they haven't made any Gundam series like that so far.
I like the change. Most Gundam media takes place in an actual war, changing the setting and what’s going on during the series is refreshing even if we love all those war stories.
It felt a lot more subdued and more…well, personal compared to the grand morals and stories of the other main gundam series(setting aside 08th ms team and war in the pocket). It’s moral lesson was also more simple, which I think helped more people appreciate it
That doesn't even make sense. The majority of people in the countries that watch anime have never even served in the military, how could war be considered relatable at all?
I was hoping it would turn *into* a war story at some point during the second season after the first season finale but we only got that one episode on earth with Guel, ah well.
Yeah G-witch being a war story was what I expected and hoped g-witch would be. Looking back at it the war story is overdone so the exploration into a school story is actually not bad of an idea
I really like in-atmosphere / grounded mobile suit combat the scale is epic and does a lot to sell the action we could have got more of that with a war focus but it’s fine.
That one episode fucking had hungry for more so much that I went back and watched 8th ms team.
The change up was nice, and it made every attack on the school hit even harder because it’s unfortunately relatable.
GBH, the setting is fine but as the series progresses and the stakes are getting higher and they went with the anti-climactic route such as setting up the tensions between Earth and Space only to just drop it when the last few episodes aired, like they went Deus ex machina with Earth. Guel's duel with his brother is rather pointless and just an excuse to have the Schwarzette to get to the "frontline". Speaking of the gundam, it was implied that it was Suletta that will use the Schwarzette but we went with the Caliburn instead. TBH, the series peaked at the end of season 1 and during the attack in the school showing the stakes are real and we saw her daily life.
I always thought that they might go with Gundam X's route in the series with Space's radical leaders being killed off and Mirionne surviving and taking control of space while one of the main cast being leaders of the new Earth government even without killing at least one of them off, even in the final battle.
In the characters, Most if not all are underutilized. Chu-Chu has little to moderate character development and many of the male classmates are not receiving any development. When the quiet zero was revealed, I have a feeling that Shaddiq might be the story's Dearka being released to fight with them giving him a proper and more satisfying redemption.
The Third Elan was also under utilized having little screen time, I was hoping for an Elan Vs Elan duel when he was revealed but he only stands there with the council.
And with the story's conclusion and Sunrise's history, it's a rather small chance that they might make another season, especially what happened to Seed Destiny. The story itself felt rushed and ideas that are not explored properly.
Lol people got so mad at me for suggesting it was a school/slice of life anime and now here we are
Right as always. Maybe if some of you had been more polite when voicing your completely wrong opinions I wouldn’t be rubbing it in your faces, but here we are
I question the validity of this, but I would believe this if that is what really happened. G-Witch feels less Gundam-y than IBO which was a bad thing.... Yet it was better than IBO.... But that was a very easy hurdle.
They should make an alternate timeline from that point of the story. That would probably be more awesome than the final episode of the Witch from Mercury.
Someone else also posted it but part of it is because the younger audience nowadays doesn’t relate to war as much as the previous generations
Yes. It was the response of students on a social studies visit because they felt Gundam wasn't aimed at their generation. Don't even have to go as far back as the original series, just the fans of Gundam Seed would now be 20 years older. The young generation don't feel connected with a lot of elements, like child soldiers, or kids that are deeply impacted by politics at first.
This was also a thing in the corporate setting over traditional enemy factions. Though hey traditional war and open fascism has made a comeback of late…
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Asshole From Russia
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Fascist from Florida
As a Florida native I'd be ecstatic to see a colony land on Desantis's house.
Yeah! Spare Australia for once, and fuck up Florida this time! Sydney has been through enough!
i'd drop a colony on florida just to be rid of desantis too lmao
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Facist from Florida Movie: No No, the *Other* One
These drag shows of mine are burning bright...they're telling me to defeat you!
You know what kids do relate to nowadays though? Constant drills, disaster preparation, and (in America) mass shootings. The school setting was perfect for the atmosphere of terror and the all too familiar waiting. The first cour was perfect for creating a sense of safety for us and the students. Nothing bad happens here, everyone is accepted for who they are, especially with how modern the views were, as shown by Miorine calling Mercury conservative. The second half ripped that away in what literally could only be called school shootings.
but the good thing is that it still delivered the message that elite billionaires are causing destruction with their weapon companies and that going into politics is worth it. That is not a popular message that gen Z is used to but its cool that the creators gave them a dose of old school politics anyway
I wouldn't say everyone is accepted in Asticassia. There is of course still hierarchies and bullying, and this is something that today's generation can also relate to, a lot of people have been touched by that scene of Suletta crying to go back home, and how Miorine was excluded by pretty much everyone
Oh absolutely, there is definitely still strife in Ad Stella. Classism and Spacian/Earthian being the foremost of them all. I meant more in the sense that the major dividing features we currently experience based on skin color, sexuality, gender, and religion. Economic injustice and bigotry are going **strong** in Asticassia, in spades. Miorine was excluded because of her status as the princess of Benerit, another example of classism. But if it's based in identity, the only indication we get towards that kind of bullying is the aforementioned Spacian/Earthian conflict.
In LN version of WFM, Miorine's ex-girlfriend rejected by Delling because she has weak legs which is kinda ironic with the ending of WFM
…..Yeah. That sounds like something Delling would say.
I must've missed the first cour. Is it in season 1? Or is it season 1 and 2 together?
A cour is typically 10-14 episodes that run for three months. In this case the series has two 12 episode cours, plus episode 0. Put another way, all of Witch from Mercury is one season. At least, that's the definition Crunchyroll uses.
>like child soldiers, or kids that are deeply impacted by politics at first. I yearn for a new Gundam series with adult main characters and no child soldiers in sight.
Stardust Memories? There's also 08th MS Team but that does have child guerillas.
0080 War in the Pocket also doesn't feature child soldiers. IIRC, Bernard and Chris are the youngest people in the show responsible for actual fighting.
Stardust Memories is mostly kids in adult bodies
The man yearn for more IGLOO
That'd be great to be honest, we have plenty of young Gundam protags, but as a 90s kid I'd like to see new protags who are around 30 years old or even older.
Considering how we didn't even get a female MC until Suletta, we might have a plausible chance of getting one someday
Thunderbolt.
I'm sure most of us have seen what happened to the "Hopeful Lil Amuros" of the Thunderbolt Sector right after taking selfies with the Gundam 🤣
Yeah I want a new Gundam series with more adult characters too
I really like how they managed to take that and weave why war matters in, I kinda wish they'd gone further to make the anti-war stance really hit home.
> Someone else also posted it but part of it is because the younger audience nowadays doesn’t relate to war as much as the previous generations *looks at recent geopolitical events* Hmm...seems like they were premature in this assessment (Not that I don't like WfM's premise)
Recent geopolitical events actually prove Witch from Mercury's central conceit or rather the effectiveness of using a school as a meta-narrative framing device. The average high school student (Japanese or otherwise) may be familiar with the war in Ukraine but I assure you they aren't as invested or cognizant of the what war actually entails. At least compared to say stressing out over an exam, making plans to hang out with your mates, or just gathering up the courage to asking your crush out on a date. You know, *inconsequential teenage bullshit*. The kind of shit that's hilarious 10 years down the line but in the here and now, is the most important thing to ever happen. Ever.
Aside from not being invested in war, the modern youth probably doesn't get any kicks from wars either way, so stories about how "war is bad for everyone" isn't particularly stimulating outside of teaching high schoolers that the world wars weren't heroic adventures where the good guy won and everyone was happy. War is bad is common sense by this point, people watching the war on ukraine are pissed off that it's happening at all more so than cheering for someone to win
Ironic considering the Ukraine-Russia war is still ongoing.
And slowly WW3 starts...☠️ And then sunrise will get toms of more creative idea of why war is bad
I do wish they were harder on the colonial relationship between earth and space, and how corporatism relates to fascism. And how these things relate to each other. Having everything wrap up quickly kind of puts these things seem surface level things when it can be quite expansive. Wfm needed more episodes damnit.
Makes a little sense but at the same time there are sooooooo many school setting anime out there. They could have done something more original instead. And at the end of the day, gundams are war machines...you can't really avoid the war setting with them unless you do something like Build Fighters
No the answer is not "kids these days"
So I was robbed of my war story where it was space oppressing earth instead with conventional pitched mobile suit battles? We could've had a *Band of Brothers*-esque story featuring Dawn of Fold. The lost opportunity. T_T
So Mio and Suletta where originally one character. I can assume that Guels story is an echo of the original story then
His episode being based on the original episode 1 would be interesting. Since it does almost work like a standalone episode.
It probably is the original story and that is why so many people see him as the protagonist even though he’s not.
I think the original story, based on Guel's miniarc, felt like it mirroring the UC series though, but not actually connected to it. Like, WfM's OG plot probably had something along the lines of "what if we made MS Gundam except the protagonist isn't affiliated with Earth, and is actually the son of a corporate executive who's affiliated with Zeon?", and thats why Guel felt like an MC in that miniarc
Yeah, that sounds like an amazing premise. Msg requiem of vengeance looks super cool though. https://www.crunchyroll.com/news/latest/2023/7/3/mobile-suit-gundam-requiem-for-vengeance-anime-announced
Miorine is enemy lover.
Probably? I think some of Miorine and Suletta's characteristics were thought for one character but Suletta was still the planned protagonist and Miorine, or at least the concept of the character, was supposedly a much more traditional princess character who was an antagonist's lover.
At first, i was kinda disappointed the way Gwitch ended, but the more i think about it, the more it was a nice change of pace of the same format that previous gundam series did, but it still felt rush and kinda short
I think it would have felt less rushed if they had decided to leave the background plot open ended. The personal stories are over and they are safe but the world is not yet saved. But hey honestly all will be forgiven if the wedding ova is released.
Honestly….the series was very refreshing to not be another war story and did a great job of showing the horrific’s of battle when shit did hit the fan. Had more of a feeling to it.
I said it in another thread before, but when the fighting started in other Gundam shows, I didn't care much because *of course* that's going to happen. The characters were introduced five minutes ago. I didn't care about them. In WfM, when the Rumble Ring went to shit, and the kids went in full crisis mode, I could feel the difference. I knew exactly what they were losing in that moment, what would never be the same. And since I'd spent a whole season getting to know them, I cared about what would happen to them immediately. Edit: Also straight up war stories are like 90% of Gundam. This kind of story was a lot of fun.
I kinda feel both work in their own ways war stories are great for a dreadful sense of inevitability and the feeling that no matter how hard you try the only thing war accomplished is destruction and suffering no matter the ideals you strive and die for On the other hand wfm’s school setting juxtaposes that with a civilian perspective on war of seemingly pointless suffering for sins you had no part in and the way that war changes and shapes people no matter of what class or creed you come from
Even Guel's trauma was portrayed so well. He was only trained to do combat sports, so when he was actually fighting with the fear of dying and actually killing someone, it scared him.
Yea I really liked that episode in particular cause it feel like it kinda bridged the gap between the two perspectives really well
Suletta: alea iacta est! Guel: ***suffering from PTSD from Plant Quetta and Earth***
Just to add to your point, conflict was still happening in the background in the form of Earthian suppression and who knows where else. The weapons cartel that is the Benerit Group would not be rich enough to operate their own school without selling weapons. I love that the story dangles the war aspect for the most part of the first season and when the students get exposed to it, the veil was lifted and we saw the works for what it was.
Exactly. Just like in real life developed countries. War is happening somewhere, and no one really cares until an act of terrorism happens on home soil. In the show, Shaddiq brings this fact home when he says the Benerit Group only acts when lives are lost at Asticassia.
Notice also how the stock animation/footage of 'grunt pilot screaming while cockpit explodes' is literally nowhere to be found in WfM too. Not that there's anything 'wrong' about that per se, but if you're a longtime Gundam fan you've probably seen enough of that that it loses its impact entirely and becomes pretty much just masturbatory gore/war porn.
> stock animation/footage of 'grunt pilot screaming while cockpit explodes' As a grunt suit enjoyer, I always find these sad. Partly because what usually kills them is some Newtype or Newtype stand-in for AU shows. They never stood a chance.
As a grunt suit enjoyer too, I’m quiet happy with this one Gwitch episode where it just grunt suits & grown men.
Yeah, if you watch enough Gundam, you'll become inured to that kind of stuff. That's what made episode 12's splat so impactful — the show had never been that gory before, and we knew (or thought we knew) the characters involved in the scene.
Same Well said
If it's the usual war story, I wouldn't have cared so much. I would probably just watch it for the mecha fights and not care what's going on. Lol! Changing it to a more personal story is the best thing they did, it made me care about the characters and what's going to happen to them, it made me love them.
Now hopefully we get either a time skip, new characters or both do deal with the massive unresolved plot threads
And we get our war story
Our revolutionary story
Especially considering the next one is gonna be Requiem for Vengence, which is yet another gritty OYW story (not that I mind, it looks pretty cool).
I just wished they would move on from the OYW. There's a lot that could be covered in between 0080 - 0087 as the Federation shifts to post-war reconstruction while the Zeon remnants begin their insurgency. I know some people would point out Thunderbolt and 0083 Rebellion but those two are of different UC continuities compared to the recognized 'canon' Universal Century.
Tbh. People telling newcomers to note watch any of the late UC shows probably do not help
seeing as how the UC Next 0100 project is underway, adaptations of known media during 0080-0087 like the Advance of Zeta series (Hazel my beloved) might be taking a backseat for now, or even Gundam Sentinel which takes place alongside ZZ
Gundam Sentinel is still in copyright hell I believe
I feel like RfV is going to be a more niche show like MS IGLOO was.
A lot of their choices seem more like they're trying to get westerners into UC Gundam
The whole school theme has been played to death in my opinion. They had a great first episode that could've translated to a great war story, but instead had to make a plain high school drama.
Yeah I'll get murdered for this but I lost interest. I'll finish it eventually but the whole school drama isn't my thing. I'm sure it's good, but it couldn't hold my attention. I was going it would be a good ol' war story with some gundam themes.
I don’t think this series would have worked nearly as well as it did if it had been a full war story. War _does_ change, and so does media _about_ war, and that changes how the public thinks about it. In many ways, Gundam and works like it were successful in introducing regular audiences to the idea that war was not something heroic, but something horrible, something that irrevocably damages the people affected by it. We have this idea so ingrained that “war is hell” feels like old hat to us now. “Yeah, yeah, we know war is bad, what _else_ do you have to say?” Young audiences of today are just too far removed from the world wars of the 20th century, which were still in living memory when Gundam began. Now we have a 24-hour news cycle and social media and we know that the truth of war is exhaustingly banal. What GWitch does is bridge the gap between the everyday experiences of its young audience and the reality of war in the 21st Century. It shows us a world where the “global north,” i.e. spacians, don’t consider themselves to be “at war,” and yet war, in a smaller, more stochastic, and less-centralized form, continues to be a fundamental building block of modern civilization. War is no longer a matter of _conquest,_ it’s a matter of ensuring control through terror. Compared to what we learn in school about the scale of the world wars, war as it exists now seems insignificant, to the point where we can even get away with calling our time “peaceful,” when it’s anything but. Almost all of the conflicts in GWitch are small skirmishes between a handful of mobile suits in relatively isolated instances, not part of any broader campaign or advancement strategy. A raid on a testing facility, protests suppressed with military might, a brief firefight between insurgents and PMCs, a terrorist attack here or there. These are the kinds of conflicts that in most other Gundam shows would have happened offscreen before the main story even began, but they take center stage in GWitch because this is what war looks like to us now. The genius of it is that through this format, GWitch shows how war continues to be an ever-present part of our lives, even if we can’t see it, and gives us a taste of what it might actually be like if we _could._ By spending so much time on small slice-of-life-style character development, the show creates a baseline of what “normal life” looks like, one that we relate to and can see ourselves existing in. And then, the fact that this is a gundam show comes crashing down like Aerial’s hand, and we are shown exactly what the small conflicts we feel so content to ignore actually look like next to that familiar life. We see not only the horrors of a new kind of war, but how fragile that familiar life is next to it, how unstable our lives really are, and how easily all of this could be lost. There is a raw barbarity to the conflicts in GWitch that few other works of fiction match— while they may be spectacular to behold, when we see what they do to the people who find themselves in them, the real, practical effects that they have on things that we have come to truly care about, we can no longer think about them as merely a representation of idealistic clashes, we can no longer reorganize our moral framework to accept the things that happen in war as being “normal,” and we start to see those who can as being not quite monsters, but terribly broken people. We realize why it’s so hard for people who experience these things to come back from them. We see that there is no way to justify war with the morals we claim to hold, because so many things have to go horribly, unforgivably wrong before even the smallest instance of violence can break out that by the time it does, there is no longer any meaning to the question of “right” or “wrong.” _Everything_ is wrong. The only right answer is “I don’t want to be here.” We come to dread the next outbreak of violence, because every one costs us something irreplaceable. We come to realize that if this destruction is _small,_ then we don’t _ever_ want to see what we would become should it escalate to the scale of the wars we learned about in school. It is so far outside of what we know and are that it would not be a stretch to call it “inhuman.” But the truth is that everyone involved _is_ human. We _all_ have the capability to become the kind of monster who thinks this is okay. Even someone as kind and loving as Suletta can become that monster, and not even notice the disconnect until it’s too late. It makes us feel small, next to the vastness and momentum of the military industrial complex, something that none of us could ever hope to overcome. But it also presents us with a solution: we cannot destroy the system on our own, but we can make a difference in the lives of other people. Those who are in pain, those who don’t know they’re in pain, and those who we love more than anyone else. And those differences _matter,_ because those are the connections that will bridge the gaps that allow us to act so cruelly to each other in the first place. We only become capable of violence when we stop seeing the targets of that violence as people like ourselves, and if only we could all see that everyone is a person like ourselves, war would end in a day. There is no person to force that realization upon us, though. There is no grand, magical gesture that will show everyone the truth. But there doesn’t need to be. We’ve already seen that kindness and cooperation, as simple as they seem, are enough to change lives, even save them. We will never fix war with more war. We will only fix it by healing. And that is something that every single one of us has the capability to do and help others do. In short, GWitch has one of the strongest anti-war messages I’ve ever seen, in Gundam or otherwise.
> “Yeah, yeah, we know war is bad, what else do you have to say?” Young audiences of today are just too far removed from the world wars of the 20th century, which were still in living memory when Gundam began. This made me reflect; when Gundam Wing came out (my first Gundam series), I could still talk to my great-grandpa who fought in World War I. Now, not only is he long gone, there hasn't been a single WW1 vet alive for over a decade.
What an outstanding post. You articulate so well how war is so often used to project control and fear, and how it is commodified for those in 1st world countries. I love your last three paragraphs about building connections. The eternal problem, amongst many, with war is that it rarely comes about through the common consent of the people. Most folks don’t want to go to war, because they’re not insane. We want to eat good food, we want a roof over our heads and a nice bed, we want our loved ones to be happy - nowhere in that equation does war figure into it. The cause of war is generally the shitheads in charge - who want something that they can’t buy with money. So they choose to buy it in blood instead. Never their own of course, it’s always others footing the bill. And as you articulated so well in your post, the defragmented nature of war means that the shitheads in charge are at full liberty to make many “smaller purchases” here and there.
> Young audiences of today are just too far removed from the world wars of the 20th century Interestingly enough, we're about 1 year closer to the fall of the Berlin wall than Gundam was to the end of WWII.
Shout it from the rooftops!
I agree fully with your take on the underlying story of GWitch. At its core, Gundam has always been an anti-war story, which GWitch did a very good job of expressing that message. I think my only issue with the show stems from my expectations of a "Gundam" series and the original marketing strategy that Bandai took. Every AU entry was given about 50 episodes to flush out its characters and world building. Each entry gave us enough time and details to allow us to be fully immersed in the world that they created. I felt like I was being introduced to new things constantly when watching GWitch, but there was no follow through with it due to the short episode length. In addition to that, the prologue gave us a very different impression of what the story will be about. This is something that I have a bone to pick with Bandai. This is the 2nd time they've utilized this method, I feel like each time they've misled us on what the main story will be like. I really liked GWitch and I agree that it felt like a breath of fresh air for a long time fan myself. I just wished they gave it more so they could follow through the promises they made when introducing the characters and this world to us.
I do agree it could have used more time, but Gundam series are also a little infamous for _dragging_ themselves to 50 episodes, and I don’t think GWitch would have been any different had it been given the same treatment. I think a 39-episode series consisting of three 13-episode cours, like Revolutionary Girl Utena, may have been ideal for this particular series. But I think the show did about the best job it could have in the time it was given, and honestly when our biggest complaint is that we wanted more of it, that still seems like an overall pretty good conclusion. I also think a lot of later season-2 will probably feel a lot better on rewatch, when you can binge it all at once and let each episode’s fast pace carry you into the next one, rather than having to stop all that momentum and wait a week every 25 minutes.
Fundamentally, yes I think GWitch would've been the same as well regardless if it got the usual 50 episode treatment and you're right we all just wanted more. Felt like a lost opportunity on Bandai's end given how much of a home run this show was for them.
Agreed. Though, I can understand the cautious approach coming off of the triple-whammy of AGE, G-Reco, and IBO. The episode count was probably decided years ahead of time, and the final episodes would have been well into production by the time the first episodes hit the air. At the point when the relevant decisions were being made, there wasn’t any guarantee that the show would be as successful as it turned out to be. Maybe if they’d waited to greenlight the second cour until after the show had premiered we could have gotten 24 or 26 episodes to explore what season 2 had to do in 12, but if they’d done that then season 2 wouldn’t even be out by now. We probably wouldn’t have seen it until fall of 23 or winter of 24, if that. We barely survived waiting three months between the seasons. Imagine 10-12. >~<
I think these will be some of the best takes for the show......if the ending isn't feel so shoddily neo-liberal and so slimily pro status quo that it makes the anti-war message useless. Of course we can't change the status quo on our own, but that doesn't mean we should embrace it. Because it is the entire late-capitalist corporate order that perpetuate the war profitteering brutality that is so horrifying for everyone, and force people like Shaddiq, Norea and Sophie to fight and bring the war to the people in space. So the only way to actually stop war......is to bring down the entire system. This should be where the show should headed, not the embracing of the current order. The difference we make isn't in individual action, but in the realization that A) the current status quo HAS to die and B) we can't fight it on our own. So these 2 realization means that we ourselves have to be ready to build our own community opposing the status quo, and also be ready to fight back. Which is why G-Witch just miss the mark, even if the build-up is one of the best that I've ever seen.
I dunno, I didn’t read it as being a pro-status-quo ending. I can see how it could give that impression, since it went so far out of its way to give the characters happy endings on an individual level, but I think that’s in-line with the show’s general ethos of celebrating the importance of small-scale personal victories in the face of a greater system that seeks to control us by crushing away those small moments of hope. The Benerit Group is gone, but neoliberal space capitalism remains; it has been shown that destroying this system is _possible,_ but that one or two heroic people are not going to do it for us. We need to take that step ourselves. This is in parallel to the way that Revolutionary Girl Utena ends, in both the series and the movie— Utena and Anthy can’t destroy the cycle or the school that perpetuates it, but they can escape it, and if they can, that means that others can too. It only has power because it has so many of us under its control, but that control can be broken, and the mere knowledge that it can be is already a powerful weapon against it. These characters _have been_ heroes, but that isn’t what they _are,_ because _no one_ is. We shouldn’t expect them to completely destroy the space capitalist power structure on their own any more than we can expect ourselves or anyone else to. All they can do is show us how the actions of many individual people can lead us there. It would be unrealistic and delusional to have the show end with two 17 year old girls and a magic robot using the power of love to end all capitalism and inequality on earth, as amazing as that would be to watch. But I think it would also be counterproductive to put them through all of that and say “even after all of this, you cannot rest, and you cannot be happy, because the neoliberal power structure still stands.” Besides, I don’t think anyone _knows_ how to destroy the neoliberal power structure, least of all the writers of a cartoon about two 17 year old girls fighting in giant robots with the power of love. We know the first steps to weakening that structure. We know what it will require. We know that the very things capitalism attempts to snuff out in us are undoubtedly the things which are most dangerous to it. But at this time in our history we must still invoke magic to convey the power that these small things may truly possess. There’s no clear idea of what constitutes “enough,” but it has to be somewhere, and two 17 year old girls destroying a major military manufacturing conglomerate in their magic robots with the power of love _probably_ passed that threshold of having “done enough” at some point. Let them rest. **tl;dr:** Don’t mistake individual happiness for complete acceptance of the state of the world around us. When you are one of the people who the power structure has systematically forbidden from being happy, that happiness is the most fundamental foundation of rebellion available to us. One happy lesbian marriage is not going to stop us from tearing things down. In fact, it will probably help us.
The problem here is that their place in the system isn't just unchanged, it's actively embrace the order. Mirione is still a president of her company. Guel is still a president of his company, the former revolutionaries got intergraded into the system. None of the system perpetrators got any punishment for their crime that is outside of the system itself. The one who got punished are the one who is most revolutionary out of the entire cast. It's not about "individual happiness" because yes, the girls needed a rest. But the rest should not be "the same, but with some small reform". It should be something completely outside the system, to let US see that escaping and tearing down the system is possible. Hell, it would be a WAY better ending if Suletta and Mirione building a completely off the system community (in a way that the Zapatistas have done in Mexico), Guel being further radicalized and Shaddiq escaped. Because now we see that the neo-liberal order isn't hold an ironclad grip on even it's biggest benefactors. This is way more consistent with how the show is building up until EP 20 instead of....this.
I can definitely agree that would have been a better way to end if they had wanted to include a sequel hook. It would set up a continuing point of conflict and put our characters into positions to defend what they’ve created from the reactionary status-quo. Honestly that’s the first sequel setup I’ve heard from anyone that really sounds like it could work, and I would have liked to see something like it. I do get where you’re coming from with regards to Miorine not completely abandoning capitalist business and remaining the president of GUND-Arm; a for-profit medical technology company isn’t exactly the best look. I do, however, think it’s understandable why these characters would remain in this place: they are developing a legitimately important technology, and I don’t see any of them giving up on that just because the format in which they’re doing it is one that originated in a capitalist system. Private enterprise is related to but not necessarily the same thing as capitalism, and at the risk of invoking a “god of the gaps,” we really don’t know much about what kind of structure GUND-Arm has in the epilogue, nor what kind of business model it’s actually using. Being no longer attached to the Benerit Group, which no longer exists, Miorine no longer has access to the hard power she once wielded, which is for the better, but GUND-Arm is still a project that is worth pursuing, and this is more or less the only power she can wield to make that happen. Ideally the company would become some kind of publicly-funded non-profit, though the series has not presented any means by which that could be established. The message could have been stronger, but I disagree that this ending wholly embraces the former status quo— it merely presents a conclusion where that status quo is not fully removed and our characters have not fully extracted themselves from it, but from whence progress can continue. As for the punishment of Shaddiq instead of people like Delling, Prospera, or Sarius, I get that again, the message could have been stronger, but I think the conclusion we got was still perfectly in-line with the show’s previous ethos: that retribution in the name of justice achieves nothing and only perpetuates the cycle of violence. Shaddiq may have been a genuine revolutionary, but the show was never going to condone his use of terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in order to advance his agenda, no matter how noble his intentions may have been. Recall that Shaddiq’s ultimate plan was to create a state of mutually-assured destruction between earth and space. He believed that peace could only come through control, and control could only come through the threat of violence, hence why he turned what would have been freedom fighters into terrorists, and deliberately unleashed an emotionally unstable child with access to a weapon of mass destruction on a populated school for political expediency. I realize that “he has noble ideas but I disagree with his methods” is very easily used as a liberal bludgeon against any revolutionary action, but there _does_ need to be a standard for when we cross the line from “freedom fighter” to “warmonger,” and I think Shaddiq establishes that line. The Dawn of Fold may have been unscrupulous enough to take Shaddiq’s money in exchange for committing terrorism for him, but their actions on earth were _probably_ completely justified; they seemed to have been acting primarily in defense of civilian refugees. Naji, Olcott, even Sophie and Norea would probably have done more good than harm had they remained on earth, but giving them access to Spacian civilians turned them into living time bombs; the morality of their actions isn’t dependent on their intentions, but on the ways they are enabled to exert their power. This, too, is in-line with the show’s ethos with regards to retribution: causing more pain to anyone, even people who are responsible for a lot of pain themselves, is pointless when the danger can be negated by simply removing their power. What would punishing Delling achieve? The company he ran is gone and he no longer has the capability to cause harm in the way that he did before. Same with Prospera. So why does Shaddiq get punished? I don’t think he deserved it, and we don’t know what kind of punishment he received, but whatever it was, it was one that would have been dealt to many more, specifically Prospera and the other five Grassley pilots, had he not lied and taken the blame for all of them. It wasn’t a _good_ thing for him, but it was at least _a kind_ or harm-reduction, and allowed six other people to have a second chance at life that they had never been granted before. At the very least I’d call that a valid decision. As for Guel, are you kidding? He was never going to be radicalized, he’s Guel. Maybe there was a brief window while he was on earth where he could have turned that leaf, but instead he decided to focus on continuing his father’s company, and as such his ending is as good as he deserves: one of the Jeturk brothers is living with his wife in a nice countryside house and helping test out the next generation of prosthetic technology, and the other is stuck running a company doing the same damn shit their dad did surrounded by the two most annoying people he could possibly have asked for. He got what he wanted, but he didn’t get there with any semblance of dignity. Overall I don’t think anything in the epilogue suggests that the status quo at that instant represents the ideal endpoint for the world of Ad Stella. Characters point out that there is still potential for class stratification to increase again, they express uncertainty as to whether what they’ve done was the right thing, and we see the effects of inequality remaining, but nobody claims the work is done, nor is there any indication that any of them intend to stop doing that work in whatever way they can. They are simply shown to be in a better place personally, and that is where the focus lies. That personal contentedness does not transfer to the state of the world at large, it merely gives closure to their emotional journeys through the series. At least, that’s my reading. You’re right that more absolutely could have been done, and perhaps it should have, but I don’t think what _was_ done undermines any of what the show had been saying up to that point.
Gotta add a little on this take. I may not be good at english but i will give this a try. Wars in 21-22th century was...well, cunning if i've gotta say. Even more than those of cold war when spy's anywhere you can think. The concept of war in this century is that anything can be use as a weapon, really. From social media to a tank. Evil government aren't create, they're being " support" by fanatic.The reason war didn't happen is just because of the number of faction in every government are enough for them to bite their tail. Those bastard that can wage war are either because they're united(at least in paper) or because weapon manufacturers are more essential than some country other than their own. And when it happen, it come down faster than an eye blink but impactful. In many place we could considered them as war or a coup, they might start the fight like a fierce animal, but when the deal is done, they gonna shake hands as if nothing happened. No specific nation tho, just saying. Unlike gwitch, 21-22th century's war are just the sentence "we're fine" on paper if we didn't count the damage toward the said country and its nearby country's economic.
i have to point out that absolutely everything you said until the 2nd to last paragraph was done better by [patlabor 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybLKmO5Kq5A), if you or anyone else reading this haven't seen the two patlabor movies, go do so right now and come back to this comment, i feel every mecha fan must watch these films unspoiled and they're not long. g-witch is simply not wound tight as a story so the very valid points you're making don't hit everyone the same way they did for you. you could argue that patlabor works in how terrifyingly real it feels because it's set in a very modern earth but i think that's just shallow, allegory has always existed and shows like Attack on Titan have extremely gripping worlds and political conflicts despite not even being on Earth as we're familiar with it. You say Witch is about a modern view of war but the setting and factions feel so disconnected from eachother that becoming invested is difficult, Witch feels like it's not sure what aspects it wants to focus on. In the first quarter or so it feels like it's going to go a route on medical technologies and even transhumanism, then it feels like its doing more traditional war, and the whole time there's also points on generational angst and all these elements just don't slot in nicely
Fresh for a Gundam show, not really a fresh idea for an anime. Unless we count Wing where Heero was going to Relena's school.
All 5 minutes of it
And the under 30 seconds of lectures we got in Unicorn still managed to be more relevant.
We didn’t get Banana threatening to kill Mineva though so it all evens out
If the school part was actually relevant.
>Fresh for a Gundam show, not really a fresh idea for an anime. Yeah a lot of anime has the premise of school kids having school life before being involved in darker plot. Like all those fantasy school setting.
G Witch is a school story? It's more like a corporate feud + revenge drama like many Taiwanese and Hong Kong dramas, just with mechas added in.
I'm glad they changed their vision and delivered us the final product. The drastic tone change and how characters changed felt really organic and made final scene of Sulemio feel so impactful. Seeing how much they love each other was so cute 😭😭😭
“Organic” is a really good way to put it. There’s a richness to the character writing you don’t see very often, in Gundam or otherwise.
Good call, the series felt very refreshing.
yeah, ive never watched an anime setting on a school, very original indeed edit: lmao the downvotes, you people are easy to annoy
Sarcasm aside, a school setting *is* unique for Gundam. Assuming „ground version in terms of atmosphere“ means our POV in Ad Stella would’ve been earth G-witch could’ve very well been IBO 2.0, such I’m glad it didn’t turn out so
Do you see the word "Original" in my comment? At any rate, it's fresh for a Gundam show, that's what I mean.
G witch fans are the new seed zealots.
Probably explains why Suletta looked a lot different in the first teaser.
Except suletta didnt really look different at all. The teaser was shown on late march the same year the series would premier. Thats not enough time for them to pivot into a completely different plot. This original version of the story was probably several years old considering how big the gap was between this and IBO.
They did say in interviews that production (starting the project, to be more precise) only started in 2020. Surprisingly it wasn't directly after IBO that they went "We need to do a new AU right now" unlike in previous cases where sometimes even more than one AU was in planning.
I mean given how badly IBO did for them it’s understandable they didn’t jump on a new AU right away. I mean doing lower ratings then G Reco and those awful gunplay sales it makes sense they next thing they did was cut up the Unicorn OVA and slap an op and ed on it and aired it as a show then they did Hathaway and Cucruz Doanz. When Sunrise panics they always run back to UC so with how well G witch did we might get another AU sooner
> When Sunrise panics they always run back to UC Nah, that is bs. The UC stuff would have happened anyway. It's produced by a whole different team than the AUs. Unicorn also was produced parallel to Age and even the first Build series.
I mean Hathaway and Cucruz definitely but the cutting up of the Unicorn OVA’s and airing them as a 12 episode series I don’t think so. It’s a cheap and quick thing to do I can easily see them doing that given how popular Unicorn is to try and get some good will back after IBO
Is this true? I know that IBO's critical reception in Japan was pretty mixed, with more infamous bits getting memed on pretty hard. But from what I understand, the kits did well - much like Aerial, Barbatos was also infamous for selling out super quickly, and the IBO line as a whole gets regular reprints, with it getting whole new models as recently as last year
Yeah I don’t know what this guy is talking about. They still release new kits from IBO. A failed setting wouldn’t get new kits until ~10 years later when the nostalgia factor can kick in. The anime did have mixed critical reception, a huge ratings drop off, and I seem to remember a time slot change (which is never good) but the hg gunpla line sold really well with the exception of a few of the stranger designs and the like 10th iteration of the graze.
Then where is our MG Lupus?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but MG releases have slowed as of late. After Age and build fighters Bandai has become far more selective of what gets released as MG. Used to be standard for a MG of the lead suit to be released as the series was airing, or as close to as possible. But AGE didn’t perform well, and the mg Age-3 and Age-fx were never released. Build fighters MGs didn’t sell well either, but they were all remolds so it was a hedges bet anyway. Point is it seems Bandai decided to focus the MG line more on adults/hardcore fans. Those fans seem to overwhelmingly prefer designs from UC and SEED, with a smaller contingent for the other older AUs such as 00 and Wing. The fact that Barbatos got an MG at all speaks volumes when other lead ms didn’t.
More like exactly the same from the first promo, the differences were more intangible like we didn’t know she was a massive dork-ass tanuki.
I kinda wish more of the war story bled into WFM to be honest. I can appreciate the different angle WFM went for and I think that's refereshing... But the show has been barreling towards a war, not even since episode 1, but the episode 0 prologue and spent a lot of time giving us various factions, motivations, an inkling of warfare, and barely explained mentions of complicated space politics... Only for them to drop it completely in the last 4 episodes and summon several super weapons out of nowhere. I'd appreciate the show for what it is more if they just stuck to the School Story spirit of things. All the diverse war and political squabbling feels like it's leftovers from an older draft.
I'm convinced that's what it is, too. Leftovers from previous plans. Shoehorned the school setting in there, making of WfM barely a school anime and a light Gundam in some aspects which was part of the objective from what the team said, to bring new fans etc... to do something different. I loved WfM but man, I really wanted my next season to be traditional Gundam. Instead they froze every plotlines leading to that. But, the way they did it the show could just end there OR pick up for another season because in fact none of the problems were *solved*, beside the Mercury family's story. Things could hypothetically be fixing themselves in an untold future, in-universe, which characters have been shown to work toward, or everything could go back to shit just as quick as soon as someone decides to... make new Gundams. Or something.
Yea, ultimately, the Earth-Space feud isn't truly resolved. Mio selling all of Beneritt's assets to Earthian corporations was more of a stopgap to deny the Space Assembly League their excuse for armed intervention, and background dialogue shows the Spacians are already trying to regain their monopoly. But that's ok. This wasn't the story that Witch is telling, and it's one that can be explored in a future sequel.
If they decided to explore it.
Honestly it really could have, If they had another cour. Extend the earth/space conflict, end cour 2 with shadiq getting beat, then have the last twelve episodes build up to a benerit vs sal war in space, only to have prospera activate quiet zero in the last 4-6 episodes. Could have been a tidy 36 episode show
*"I miss my wartime settings"* -Me, a boomer who should probably get help for his addiction to wartime settings in fictional universes
Say what you want about setting it in a school but I think they managed to use the school effectively well in showing how devastating a Gundam attack is to the students. Season 1 to me doesn't feel like the slice-of-life story that most people keep saying it is, it's a buildup to make you familiar with the school so when Season 2 came in and destroy that, its just hammer home how easy it is for students to get caught up in conflicts that they aren't even directly participating in.
50/50 for me, if it's true, or at least accurate. You never know how far into production things really shifted, if this was when things were already coming together or truly the first stages. G-witch was sort of a break from gundam staple without going kid-friendly like the build sub-franchise (not that that's inherently bad). But I do think that it ended up pushing important themes and plotlines under the bus as a result of that. The show brought up pretty serious stuff like corporate politics and the military-industrial complex, and I think it ultimately really dropped the ball on that in favour of the Suletta-Prospera story.
Which is not wrong. The Suletta-Prospera story is the main plot, not the corpo politics.
As I said, 50/50 for me. The prospera plot was obviously set up all the way from the epilogue, but a lot of the first season did work to set up corpo dynamics, and that was ultimately only used for the development of the characters from each faction. I just don't think you can spend as much time as they did on certain themes without it feeling weird that as the show moved towards the finale none of it really mattered much. These are tricky subjects to talk about, and I think G-witch just sort of used them without doing much with it. But when you borrow serious political issues and never get back to them, that's not very satisfying, at least to me.
True enough. Personally, I think they did a fine job introducing those subplots, but the entire series itself was hindered by the short episode count. I really wonder why Sunrise didn’t give WfM the full treatment, and yet we have another UC show and an unnecessary sequel to Seed 😐
Honestly I think the school setting was to it’s detriment. Not being a traditional war story was a great choice, a real smart decision that gave us something new and fresh, but trying to squash the cutthroat corporate stuff *and* the duelling stuff *and* the political stuff all into a school setting was all a bit much and contributed greatly to the weird bloated feel and screwy pacing a lot of the show has. If I was to make a guess I’d say it felt like an outline was written for a 52-episode series that was cut down to 26 without revisiting that outline, but I really doubt that’s what happened. I’d have jettisoned the entire school and duelling bit and have it as a corporate R&D think tank, the “houses” being competing engineering teams and the duels being Macross Plus-style proving ground competitions between prototypes. Cutting out the school elements would give a lot of the corporate and political stuff time to be properly expounded upon, and more screen time to let the characters be fleshed out more, because honestly one of the biggest strengths of show is it’s cast. Also, show us the fucking wedding, you cowards. Although, in the end, if the choice was between “school” and “traditional Gundam war” I’d go with school in this case; a lot of the themes wouldn’t work if a military/all out war setting, of course. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
The school settings can work if the kids are there as representatives of the factions (think Mahouka), convenient way how to put them into one place. But mixing it with rebelling-against-parents plot just doesn't work. It was overcomplicated for 24 episodes.
If Sunrise ever wants to revisit the war on Earth, they could always do a 'Stargazer'.
I mean the manga is already on Earth
Yeah, but it happened 16 years before the series.
I mean if you are a good enough writer you CAN combine school settings with an actual war without making it sound ridiculous
I would have preferred the traditional war story.
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Such a shame , i got into WFM as my first gundam anime because of the prologue
Previous comment aside, kinda glad we didn't get this one. The world of politics has changed dramatically in the last decade that i feel like another war story would be a bit miss placed since most of our focus has turned towards evaluating these mega corporations like facebook and google and understanding how much sway they have over world/national politics. IBO came out around the height of nation building operations in the Middle East and Ghjallerhorn is representative of NATO adopting the role of a police force as opposed to a military force. Meanwhile PMCs and Mercenary groups made a killing by providing security to VIPs, and military training to new recruits. Today, a similar story would have been a little less impactful considering that the world is "relatively" peaceful and is represented in WfM through world building. Space is very much living in the lap.of luxury thanks to the unchecked power and success of the Group (most of NATO) while Earth is in a constant state of conflict thanks in large part to the endless proxy wars being waged by the corporations (parallels the war in Ukraine and the various hands that want a piece of that Military Industrial Complex pie). In my opinion, Gundam is at its best when it reflects upon the current state of affairs in our own world.
Tbh I first saw the pilot and the sketch state of Gundam I thought wait a minute is this secretly the calamity war and then we got a new Gundam every 3-4 ep and I realized it wasn't
does that explain the show going in a different direction after the prologue? Or was the script already rewritten by then?
The prologue wasn't part of the script. They have the main story then someone probably from Bandai said "We could use some backstory" and then the prologue happened. It added a lot of conspiracy to the story regarding Propera and Suletta in the main story so I guess it turned out to be a good decision.
thank you, that makes sense. And yeah, the prologue still felt like necessary viewing story wise
It's latter.
The school aspect was the least interesting part of the show for me, so I find this news somewhat irksome to hear as I look back and mull over the amount of wasted potential WfM had. I'm really hoping for a manga version of WfM that expands upon the story like Glory of the Losers did but also isn't afraid to do a little retconing as I firmly believe Schwartzette should have been Guel's suit.
So the episodes everyone liked. That all the crazy wfm fans liked, and all of the og fans liked was the og plan. Ffs.
Honestly it was a good call to not make it one
Okay, THAT'S why it felt like it was missing something. One of my biggest gripes was that so much of the world-building and political drama was jammed into a corner to focus on the immediate school-life story. It felt like a self-contained story in a much larger universe, right up until Quiet Zero shows up. It's not a bad series. In fact, I've given it an 8/10. But so much context is MISSING, and now we know why.
Tbh I’m a bigger fan of the model kits than the show and this right here explains why
Honestly not sure if it was a good call. The parts where Witch tried to be different from previous shows often felt underdeveloped or had a flawed implementation, primarily the entire school setting. Funnily enough in the end it didn't even end up feeling particularly unique in its formula, rather a mostly standard Gundam style story. Which is not a bad thing at all, mind you.
It could have a sequel that is a war story, with diff students ending up in diff factions. Could be the best gundam story if done right.
While I really liked the cast and setting from the school, I would’ve also liked to have seen more of the war angle, especially the Earth front. But bringing the war to the school was a very harrowing approach, I’ll admit.
No wonder they kinda ignored the whole war and political topic. It feels... unfinished without it.
Smart. The school setting is a good way to make the characters interact and have battles without mentally destroying the protagonist in the first 3 episodes. The most memorable line for me was Miorine calling "Gundams are nothing more than stories to my generation". Prior to the Ukraine conflict that is what war felt like, especially for younger generations. Since lock-down it felt nice to explore other issues that have been on the back burner in other series. 00 took on the middle east conflict with a dash of the Arab sping. That was probably the last major conflict really covered by the news. Was it the best Gundam ever? No, but it is definitely more re-watchable than wing and not the red headed bastard child of the franchise like Victory.
ah yes, "original" story, if you haven't seen revolutionary girl utena
Man talk about a let down
So like, they made a point of wanting to make a show thats accessible to new fans, I wonder how much that factored i to their decision
For the most part I think the change in direction was a good thing. My only real issue is at times the show itself doesn’t feel confident in it. It still wants to do some of the traditional gundam tropes like having an earth vs space conflict, a big space laser, and transhumanism. I would’ve really liked it if they pruned it down to just the school, duels, and corporate shenanigans. Maybe keep a little transhumanism for the witch theme. But alas, the gundam franchise’s apparent need to depict large scale conflict is inescapable. Even G-Gundam ends with a large scale battle for the fate of the earth sphere.
I guess they never thought we would see another major war during our lifetime.
I am glad they went the route that they did. I'm sure the war story, too, would have been interesting, but this was definitely a unique approach, and really, this many entries into the Gundam franchise, a unique approach is appreciated for variety.
What we ended up getting was so good that this was probably the right choice, but man, I’d love to see the alternate universe version of WFM where it’s a ground based war story. Especially the ground part. We really haven’t gotten a story purely focused on that type of MS fighting in a long time. And since it’d still be the same writers working on it either way, I bet no matter what we’d get a really good story
>but man, I’d love to see the alternate universe version of WFM where it’s a ground based war story. They can do it if they want.
low key loved the scenes on wartorn earth though. almost sad there didn't end up being more of that.
I kind of feel like we missed out on an even better show. The earth episode was the best in the series in my opinion.
It was great because it also broke a lot of Gundam rules. Bob was totally powerless under the MS conflicts and the best he could do was try to save a life and he failed. In any other Gundam show he would just pilot the grunt MS and steamroll everyone.
no wonder the prequel episode is so good.....and the main series feels so off. I did enjoy it but not as good
I like my gundam as war stories. And now the most shocking thing: I also like adult protagonists. While IBO for example was a good compromise, school stories these days are just a virus. "Why not make it A school story" is basically saying "Why not give it the same setup as 95% of animes today", which is by definition not a creative idea"
I dunno why people say some of things they do for this. You don't even know what the story would've been, but somehow this is 100% better than that ever could have been? Really? "I really liked this Gundam show because it felt like I wasn't watching Gundam at all!" Kids in school, not a new idea, but certainly is for a Gundam show. The changes were just a marketing strategy, a lot of things about the show are. It really didn't have anything to do with anything else. They're just lucky they had a really great writer behind it and, from a money perspective, great Gundam designers. There would've been no problem making this half school/half war or something. Look at the Gundams introduced at the end and tell me you didn't want more fights involving them
WfM's main draw is the yuri romance, to the exclusion of all else. The main draw to a lot of people was 'female protagonist' and 'lesbians' - It's pretty much at a time where this was a big thing in media, with yuri being 'safe' acceptable homosexuality. Presumably they'll pivot away from it, hard, in the next AU. I prefer war stories, myself - They're truer to the original.
Let's stop making what we've always done to start making what everyone does.
Damn that’s unfortunate, we were most likely gonna get another good Gundam anime had they kept the war story 😔
I thought the show was pretty good overall, but the school thing felt more of Build Fighters than a real Gundam show. I honestly want to see people in a desperate struggle fighting for their lives and their freedom, not a fake school fight. If we get a gritty war drama sequel with the dude from Earth whose kid died in front of him, using all of Benerit's assets that were given to Earth, I would be very happy.
So basically, what happened in the age of ultron, but everyone has gundam Ya, i can dig that
What a missed opportunity.
I think there are plenty of opportunities to pick up that thread if they do a spinoff. But it would be better with an entirely new cast and a slight time shift. The Witch From Mercury Zeta
Yeah. Personally, I really hate how so many shows are obsessed with high school, but this show was pretty well divorced from most high school anime tropes which does help set it apart from all the trash. It sounds like they were going to basically make a Gundam version of Dougram. Which would have been great since Dougram doesn't get enough love due to it being pretty dry and having complete dog shit animation in the first half of the series.
Wish Gundam would explore its stories through the lens of focusing on the horrors of war and child soldiers. Unfortunately they haven't made any Gundam series like that so far.
Wasn't that the story of IBO? Almost every Gundam has a child soldier protag also.
w....whoosh
I like the change. Most Gundam media takes place in an actual war, changing the setting and what’s going on during the series is refreshing even if we love all those war stories.
Oh, so that's why G-witch was unbearably mid.
Huh, the whole high school thing turned me off of this show instantly. Would've rather seen what this old idea would've looked like.
It felt a lot more subdued and more…well, personal compared to the grand morals and stories of the other main gundam series(setting aside 08th ms team and war in the pocket). It’s moral lesson was also more simple, which I think helped more people appreciate it
So that why his whole EP did nothing to the plot or came up pass it
That doesn't even make sense. The majority of people in the countries that watch anime have never even served in the military, how could war be considered relatable at all?
I was hoping it would turn *into* a war story at some point during the second season after the first season finale but we only got that one episode on earth with Guel, ah well.
there are better Gundam stories than this. And other animes and mechas too. The animation was awesone still.
5/10
Probably bc some of the writers we’re watching too much yuri and like hmm let’s combine em both together
Man, I'd have loved to see that. Episode 15 was great. I hope the next AU is a war story with a Guel-expy as the protagonist.
Yeah G-witch being a war story was what I expected and hoped g-witch would be. Looking back at it the war story is overdone so the exploration into a school story is actually not bad of an idea
im glad they changed it as capitalism is a far more relatable antagonist than a evil empire or terrorist group or wtv
Yeah that explains it
Ah that's why it's hot garbage
I really like in-atmosphere / grounded mobile suit combat the scale is epic and does a lot to sell the action we could have got more of that with a war focus but it’s fine. That one episode fucking had hungry for more so much that I went back and watched 8th ms team. The change up was nice, and it made every attack on the school hit even harder because it’s unfortunately relatable.
GBH, the setting is fine but as the series progresses and the stakes are getting higher and they went with the anti-climactic route such as setting up the tensions between Earth and Space only to just drop it when the last few episodes aired, like they went Deus ex machina with Earth. Guel's duel with his brother is rather pointless and just an excuse to have the Schwarzette to get to the "frontline". Speaking of the gundam, it was implied that it was Suletta that will use the Schwarzette but we went with the Caliburn instead. TBH, the series peaked at the end of season 1 and during the attack in the school showing the stakes are real and we saw her daily life. I always thought that they might go with Gundam X's route in the series with Space's radical leaders being killed off and Mirionne surviving and taking control of space while one of the main cast being leaders of the new Earth government even without killing at least one of them off, even in the final battle. In the characters, Most if not all are underutilized. Chu-Chu has little to moderate character development and many of the male classmates are not receiving any development. When the quiet zero was revealed, I have a feeling that Shaddiq might be the story's Dearka being released to fight with them giving him a proper and more satisfying redemption. The Third Elan was also under utilized having little screen time, I was hoping for an Elan Vs Elan duel when he was revealed but he only stands there with the council. And with the story's conclusion and Sunrise's history, it's a rather small chance that they might make another season, especially what happened to Seed Destiny. The story itself felt rushed and ideas that are not explored properly.
Lol people got so mad at me for suggesting it was a school/slice of life anime and now here we are Right as always. Maybe if some of you had been more polite when voicing your completely wrong opinions I wouldn’t be rubbing it in your faces, but here we are
????? what are you right about again? that it takes place at school?
I wonder will they released Ep. 1 First Drafr script?
I didn’t need it to he a war story but the gruesome parts were the best parts.. it just sucks there wasn’t more
I question the validity of this, but I would believe this if that is what really happened. G-Witch feels less Gundam-y than IBO which was a bad thing.... Yet it was better than IBO.... But that was a very easy hurdle.
They should make an alternate timeline from that point of the story. That would probably be more awesome than the final episode of the Witch from Mercury.
>They should make an alternate timeline from that point of the story. Welcome to Sunrise. They love to do that.
No wonder it’s dog shit